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Nov. 20th, 2013 11:15 amLast night I read Rose Under Fire and then I dreamed about archiving Holocaust film footage all night, so that was fun.
I think there are two ways to talk about Rose Under Fire, which is to praise it for being at the high end of concentration camp novels, or to castigate it for not being as good as Code Name Verity, both of which I think are sort of unfortunate ways to discuss it but can't really be helped. Rose Under Fire was never going to be as good as Code Name Verity. This is sort of like when Conspiracy of Kings came out and everyone was disappointed because it wasn't as good as King of Attolia, which was also never going to happen. Code Name Verity was a very new story and an emotionally wrenching story and a very clever story all at once and that kind of thing just doesn't come together all that often.
Rose Under Fire is a concentration camp novel and a concentration camp novel is sort of fundamentally a concentration camp novel. As concentration camp novels go, it's compelling and harrowing and grants its characters as much agency as it possibly can -- although our protagonist Rose Justice does I think sort of falls into the trap of being the Identifiable Viewpoint Protagonist of a concentration camp novel. Why does she have to be naive and American and a bit literary, instead of one of the Polish girls that the book is really about? So that the presumed naive American reader can imagine themselves in her place. It's like The Devil's Arithmetic, except without having to bother with time travel.
Although of course the protagonist of The Devil's Arithmetic was Jewish, and none of the characters in Rose Under Fire are -- and here I think is where I am going to say something sort of horrible and and I certainly don't expect anybody else reading this to feel the same way, but I hugely appreciate reading World War II Germany novels about how things were also awful for people who are not Jewish.
Because, I mean, like, I know. I know about the Holocaust. I have taken in a staggering amount of knowledge and media about the Holocaust over the course of my life as a Jewish girl, and it was and is incredibly important to take it in, but, like. It's been a lot. And I do think there is a danger in The Jewish Story be the story that everyone always talks about -- not that it wasn't and isn't important to remember, always. But the Holocaust is not the only Jewish story, and the Jewish story is not the only story there is from that time, and these are both things I think are sometimes at risk of being forgotten. Single stories are a problem. We all know that.
So I'm pretty glad that Elizabeth Wein decided to tell the story of the Polish Rabbits in Ravensbruck, rather than the story of Auschwitz or any of the other Jewish concentration camps; I have no background in which to gauge how well she did it, but I'm glad she did.
I think there are two ways to talk about Rose Under Fire, which is to praise it for being at the high end of concentration camp novels, or to castigate it for not being as good as Code Name Verity, both of which I think are sort of unfortunate ways to discuss it but can't really be helped. Rose Under Fire was never going to be as good as Code Name Verity. This is sort of like when Conspiracy of Kings came out and everyone was disappointed because it wasn't as good as King of Attolia, which was also never going to happen. Code Name Verity was a very new story and an emotionally wrenching story and a very clever story all at once and that kind of thing just doesn't come together all that often.
Rose Under Fire is a concentration camp novel and a concentration camp novel is sort of fundamentally a concentration camp novel. As concentration camp novels go, it's compelling and harrowing and grants its characters as much agency as it possibly can -- although our protagonist Rose Justice does I think sort of falls into the trap of being the Identifiable Viewpoint Protagonist of a concentration camp novel. Why does she have to be naive and American and a bit literary, instead of one of the Polish girls that the book is really about? So that the presumed naive American reader can imagine themselves in her place. It's like The Devil's Arithmetic, except without having to bother with time travel.
Although of course the protagonist of The Devil's Arithmetic was Jewish, and none of the characters in Rose Under Fire are -- and here I think is where I am going to say something sort of horrible and and I certainly don't expect anybody else reading this to feel the same way, but I hugely appreciate reading World War II Germany novels about how things were also awful for people who are not Jewish.
Because, I mean, like, I know. I know about the Holocaust. I have taken in a staggering amount of knowledge and media about the Holocaust over the course of my life as a Jewish girl, and it was and is incredibly important to take it in, but, like. It's been a lot. And I do think there is a danger in The Jewish Story be the story that everyone always talks about -- not that it wasn't and isn't important to remember, always. But the Holocaust is not the only Jewish story, and the Jewish story is not the only story there is from that time, and these are both things I think are sometimes at risk of being forgotten. Single stories are a problem. We all know that.
So I'm pretty glad that Elizabeth Wein decided to tell the story of the Polish Rabbits in Ravensbruck, rather than the story of Auschwitz or any of the other Jewish concentration camps; I have no background in which to gauge how well she did it, but I'm glad she did.
